When We Dance Poem by gershon hepner

When we dance will you be gentle,
or bitter as the instrumental
lines of music in C Major
that, dying, barely thirty-ager,
Franz Schubert for two cellos wrote?
Than him I’m a far older goat,
so will I, taking off my coat, see
you looking at me just like Coetzee,
wondering if in wintertime
I hold back thoughts from you, or rhyme
with my own vigor and vibrate
like cello strings in the most great
quintet that ever has been written?
Will I rule your waves as Britain
once ruled them all? Until we dance,
let Schubert’s greatest work enhance
the way we swing, with each repeat
not missing one another’s beat.

Inspired by Katha Pollitt’s review in the NYT on December 31,2009 of J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel “Summertime, ” which also inspired “Thoughts I’ve Chosen to Hold Back” (“Any Relation to Biography Is Pure Fiction (in a Way) ”) :
So what kind of a man was the secretive young writer? To his former lover Julia, he was “not fully human, ” “like a glass ball, ” sexually “autistic” — creepily, he insists that they make love by acting out the instrumental lines of Schubert’s string quintet. His earth-motherly cousin Margot, with whom he shared an intense childhood bond, describes him as cold, possessing a “Mister Know-All smile” and uses an Afrikaner vulgarism meaning lacking in determination. Adriana, a fiery Brazilian dancer, is still irritated to have been pursued by this “soft, ” unmanly man. Sophie, his colleague and lover at the university, is similarly underwhelmed: “I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person, a truly exceptional human being.” Another colleague, Martin, says of him that as a teacher, as a friend, “Something was always being held back.” Readers of Mr. Coetzee’s books know what that something was: the fierce, bleak, imaginative life running in his head. The notebook fragments with which the book begins and ends give us the man the interviewees didn’t know, the one who writes in the third-person voice, at once flat and intense and remorseful, of “Boyhood” and “Youth.” There, he portrays South Africa pitilessly: the staggering violence, the aridity and complacency of Afrikaner culture, the moral corruption of apartheid.


1/1/10